Jonny - Any Idiot ...

Constantly breaking things

At least that’s what the better half believes I’m constantly doing – I like to think I’m constantly improving things (and learning along the way of course). What’s broken/improved this time? Rancher out, kubespray in I’d replaced my manually deployed k8s cluster with a Rancher

Adding Google Services to an Amazon FireHD8 (Kids Edition)

Adding Google Services to an Amazon FireHD tablet can be done using the following steps: 1. Enable installation from unknown sources. This is done in the Security & Privacy section of the tablet’s settings, and is listed as ‘Apps from Unknown Sources’. 2. Download the following APK files from

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

Hosting my own container registry

As per previous posts, I have a kubernetes cluster running at home, and also configured a local jenkins pipeline to create the container images I want to use. Recently I decided I’d like to have a look at using a different container registry instead the very standard docker-registry. To

centos

Installing a kubernetes cluster on CentOS

Nothing too exciting here – there are plenty of guides and instructions on how to install kubernetes on CentOS already. For my particular purposes though, I’m going to veer off the usual pathway taken and run my cluster as follows: * 8 VMs running CentOS 7.6 split across 2 (oldish)

bash

Hockey results

A bit of hiatus from posting at the end of the year. There wasn’t really one particular reason for the lack of posting, but a combination of being busy with other stuff, i.e. getting presents sorted for Christmas etc. and also not really having much going on that

acqusition

Some personal thoughts on IBM acquiring Red Hat

Sometimes Monday mornings aren’t the best part of the week, although having three children under 4 years old, it can sometimes be quite nice having an escape route to the office after a busy weekend. Monday 29th October can definitely be filed in the ‘unexpected’ category. It’s definitely

kubernetes

Upgrading Kubernetes to 1.12.1

Having got my kubernetes cluster up and running hosting the applications I’d wanted to run, I had kind of let it fall into a state of known neglect. I knew it was running – the applications (such as this very blog) continued to run and as far as I cared,

toys beyblades son

Boys and their toys: Beyblades

I’ve always liked my toys – you can probably tell that from reading some previous entries. Do I really need a multi-node Raspberry Pi kubernetes cluster for example? Not really, but it’s a fun thing to have and play with. Anyway, this post is not about my latest technology

googlecloudsummit kubernetes

Google Cloud Summit ... done

I’ll answer the outstanding question from my previous [https://blog.ervine.org/2018/10/cloud-summit/] entry straightaway. Yes, there is such a thing as a free lunch. However, when you’re one of 1500+ needing to be fed at roughly the same time, it’s not going to be

googlecloudsummit conferences brainshare

Cloud Summit

It’s one day to go until #GoogleCloudSummit [https://cloudplatformonline.com/2018-Summit-HongKong-Home.html] in Hong Kong. I don’t go to many of these industry conferences. Thinking back, I’ve been to Novell BrainShare UK in Salford, Novell BrainShare in Barcelona, Red Hat Tech Exchange in Bangkok, and the OpenStack

dns

Deploying and using Unbound

As per the previous post [https://blog.ervine.org/2018/10/linux-and-name-resolution/]I was working through a customer query about name servers and caching, and with some background reading discovered that the Linux name resolver library does not cache successful (or failed) name lookups. This can be helpful and in

caching

Linux and Name Resolution

Nothing kubernetes related here, for a change. This is more for my own benefit and something to refer back to in the future. This post will detail how the Linux TCP stack performs name resolution, and is inspired by a recent customer case, which then meant I did a fair

aws

CE/CC

Admittedly, a not very amusing play on CI/CD – my CE/CE acronym stands for Continuous Education/Continual Certification, which is my way of viewing the pursuit (and hopefully achievement) of ongoing IT based certifications. This post is, kind of, a follow up to my previous post about the spaghetti

certifications

Certifications

If there’s one thing the IT industry has a lot of, it’s certifications. There is a bewildering array of certifications available for people who like collect the spaghetti soup of letters on offer. Some of these are undoubtedly more prestigious than others.Obviously, any certifications I personally hold

containers

Finishing off

Having detailed [https://blog.ervine.org/2018/08/freshly-served-containers/] how I am continually building and publishing my container images, the final post in this series will round off detailing the WordPress installation that this blog is being hosted on. Putting it together It would be very simple to dump all

build

Freshly served containers

Up to this point [https://blog.ervine.org/2018/08/building-my-own-images/] I’ve been able to create my own container images and also store their build configuration on a git repository. My next challenge was to automate building these images and making them available to my kubernetes cluster. It is

containers

[Opinion] Did Docker become pretty irrelevant? (and I'm only just noticing)

Somewhat click-baity post title … but bearing in mind my blog doesn’t get any traffic, I don’t suppose that really matters. This is also 100% completely my own opinion based on nothing but my own current thoughts. That means that in about a year or so I can look

build

Building my own images

I’d finished my previous post [https://blog.ervine.org/2018/08/hello-world-2/] by having setup a gogs git repository instance on my k8s cluster and made this instance accessible to both my local network (HTTP) via an external HAProxy instance and to the wider Internet (HTTPS) through my router

gogs

Hello World!

In my last post [https://blog.ervine.org/2018/08/providing-a-backend/] I had created a gogs instance using a MariaDB backend running on my k8s cluster. I had finished up by making the gogs HTTP service available to my internal network using a NodePort service in k8s. To the router

clusterip

Providing a backend

Previously [https://blog.ervine.org/2018/08/hosting-a-git-repo/], I’d deployed a pod running an instance of gogs to provide a source control repository in which I would aim to store my k8s YAML files and my container image build files. Building a backend The next step I want to

git

Hosting a git repo

Having created a very simple container image [https://blog.ervine.org/2018/08/down-the-rabbit-hole/] (basic ARM based Alpine Linux 3.8) and pushed it to my own private container image registry [https://blog.ervine.org/2018/08/adding-a-container-image-registry/], the next next step to navigate is to provide a repository for

docker

Adding a container image registry

From the previous post [https://blog.ervine.org/2018/08/down-the-rabbit-hole/], I now had my 5 node k8s cluster, and had just built my own very basic container based on Alpine Linux 3.8 for the Raspberry Pi. The next step is to have this container available to my k8s

sport

Pre-Season Training

Tomorrow The end of the summer is approaching and that means that a new hockey season is approaching, which means the joy of pre-season training is upon me. Tomorrow in the afternoon heat and humidity of Hong Kong I get to find out if I’ve done enough running/fitness

containers

Down the rabbit hole

What’s next for the cluster? Having successfully installed a k8s cluster, the obvious question to ask is ‘what’s next?’ or ‘what do I do with this?’. There are plenty of options available here – basically anything that can run on a Raspberry Pi can be containerised and deployed as